Males of this strikingly-coloured, medium-sized bee hover and dart around patches of flowering labiates (and some other flowers) and regularly pursue other insects.
Most recently added content
Submitted by Anonymous on
,
There are very few British aculeates which are largely confined to wetland habitats. One of these is Hylaeus pectoralis, a bee which for many years was almost entirely associated with the fens of East Anglia, especially Wicken Fen, Cambridgeshire.
Submitted by Anonymous on
,
In the past, this bee was sometimes misidentified as O. parietina or O. uncinata.
Submitted by Anonymous on
,
As with other woodland insects, the fortunes of several bees have been adversely affected by modern woodland management - the abandonment of coppicing leading to stands of mature broadleaved trees or the establishment of coniferous plantations. Both these woodland types eventually shade out the understorey and its rich and varied herb communities. One bee adversely affected by such changes is Osmia pilicornis, though where suitable conditions exist it can still be locally common.
A paper describing the biology and habitat of this species Distribution, biology and… Read more
Submitted by Anonymous on
,
Several years ago, D B Baker and G R Else found that the series of Scottish Osmia inermis in the Natural History Museum, London, consisted of two closely related species: O. inermis and O. uncinata. The latter was a species not previously known from the British Isles.
Submitted by Anonymous on
,
Of the 24 species of endangered bees listed in the British Red Data Book (Shirt, 1987), four have only been recorded in recent years from a single site. One of these is Osmia xanthomelana, the largest and perhaps the most attractive of the ten species of British Osmia.
Submitted by Anonymous on
,
The four species of Stelis which occur in the British Isles are all rare bees, in contrast to some other cleptoparasitic bee genera which contain species which are often locally common.
Submitted by Anonymous on
,
The first British specimen of this bee was collected near Tilshead, Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, on 9 July 1949 by the late P W E Currie. However, about fifteen years were to elapse before its identity was established by D B Baker and the record published as Pseudocilissa dimidiata (Baker, 1964).
Submitted by Anonymous on
,
Melitta species generally have very narrow pollen preferences, either visiting a single species (monolectic) or a group of closely related species (oligolectic). The present species belongs to the second category.
Submitted by Anonymous on
,
The largest of the nine British species in the genus, with a population that apparently differs slightly from the Continental race in both morphological and ecological respects. As a result, it has been recognised as a distinct subspecies, C. cunicularius celticus, by O'Toole (1974). More recently, major differences between the Continental and British populations have been found in the chemistry of the Dufour's gland secretions (Albans et al., 1980; Duffield et al., in Bell & Carde, 1984), raising the possibility that the British populations may be specifically distinct.